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Have you checked your Web analytics just to find out your site has lost a high share of its organic search traffic in the last days? Don’t panic! Here’s a checklist that will help you to identify the reason for it:

A Web analytics tracking problem?

Verify if it’s a generalized loss happening to all of your traffic channels and areas of your site. If it’s a generalized drop, first check that your site is (and has been) online and correctly working. If so, then validate your Google Analytics Web tracking setup as it could be due to an error there.

Comparing your current traffic trend with the ones of previous years using your Web Analytics, to see if they coincide. If you don’t have historic data, use the Google Keyword Planner “Search volume trends” feature or Google Trends.

A content accessibility & crawlability issue?

Verify if your site pages & relevant content are accessible to both users and Google’s search bots -and if the traffic and rankings loss is specific to certain areas of your site, prioritize them to do this validation- by:

Browsing directly to your site pages to verify if they’re accessible, not redirected towards other addresses and they’re showing the correct 200 OK HTTP status code. You can use the “Redirect Path” Chrome Extension for this.

Simulating Google search bots (desktop & smartphone) crawling & rendering with Google Webmaster Tools “Fetch as Google” functionality to check the most important pages -and those that have specifically lost traffic & rankings- with crawlers such as ScreamingFrog or Deepcrawl.

A content indexation issue?

See if Google is not correctly indexing your pages by searching in Google to see if your site and specifically those pages or areas with traffic & rankings loss, are still indexed by using the “site:” search operator. You can also check if there has been a decrease in your site number of indexed URLs with Google Webmaster Tools “Index Status” report.

A Web security problem?

Verify if Google has detected any security problems (due to malware or spam) by checking the Google Webmaster Tools “Security Issues” area. If so, you should follow the process specified here to fix the issues and request for a review.

A manual penalization?

If the traffic loss coincides with a rankings drop, check if your site has been manually penalized by not following Google’s Webmaster guidelines -the reasons can go from having unnatural incoming links, keyword stuffing, content with little value to cloaking- in the “manual actions” section of Google Webmaster Tools.

If so, the type of action, the reason and areas of the site affected will be provided there and you’ll need to take the appropriate “clean-up” or optimization steps before asking for a reinclusion review.

A Penguin update -focused on incoming links quality & relevance-, follow the process described in these analysis and audit guides along this case study. You can also use tools like LinkRisk to facilitate the assessment of your links.